Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Maybe true, or maybe Politico’s just vamping for an excuse as to why he sucks in general. Clinton may just be full of shit and bad ideas, and they’re trying to blame “the media freakshow”, saying Clinto’s acutally right, the modern media just gets him wrong. You decide.

Politico:

ONAWA, Iowa — Bill Clinton has spent the last two weeks as an unlikely victim of a manic media environment that his wife has largely mastered.

He was pilloried by personalities from Matt Drudge to Tim Russert for remarks — often taken strikingly out of context about the charged topic of “Swiftboating” and his presidential papers.

His unexpected difficulty with the media freakshow may be a matter of style.

Though Clinton is justifiably heralded as perhaps the quintessential retail politician and political communicator of his generation, contemporary political coverage — broken up as it is into tiny blog items and wire dispatches, further chewed on by partisan blogs and opposition research shops — doesn’t favor his style.

While his wife thrives on the clarity of simple declarations — “If President Bush doesn’t end this war, I will” — the former president is always more oblique. He plays jazz to her classical music, as one longtime Clinton associate puts it.

Here in rural western Iowa, though, the former president put his low-key, encyclopedic style to good use.

He had been dispatched by the campaign to two stops in the most conservative part of the state, in a high school gymnasium in Glenwood and a high school auditorium in Onawa, to court the working-class white voters who remember his presidency fondly, and who polls say favor his wife over Sen. Barack Obama.

“I didn’t give you some high-flown speech today, I just talked to you,” he told the Onawa crowd.

Clinton ranged widely, often stepping voluntarily into controversies that his wife tries to avoid, and making associations that other political figures would never risk. In Onawa, for instance, he mused on the world view that “says all that matters in life is our differences” — seeing it at work in everything from the dark philosophy of Al Qaeda to the U.S. immigration debate.

“The Al Qaeda people think that all that matter are our differences, and ‘You do it my way or you deserve to die,’” he said.

“You see it in more benign but also troubling ways in America when something happens like that recent incident in Jena, La.,” he said, referring to the prosecution of six young black men that has been criticized as racially motivated.

“You see it in very complicated ways in the context of what do to about immigration, what’s the best way to get a handle on illegal immigration,” he said.

Clinton also offered a new defense for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

“The most forthright Republican opponent of the war in the Senate — [Nebraska] Sen. Chuck Hagel — he actually was the author of the resolution in the Senate,” Clinton said in response to a question in Glenwood. “He thought he was saying you could use military action only if the inspections failed.

“But we are where we are.”

Clinton’s audiences appeared to be immune to the national media narratives. Among the half-dozen questions Clinton took in each town, there were none about whether the race is tightening, whether his wife has played the “gender card,” about whether he is responsible for the slow release of his presidential records, or whether he meant to accuse her Democratic rivals of “swiftboating” the New York senator last week.

The questions to Clinton in Glenwood and Onawa concerned healthcare, education, veteran’s benefits, the cost of living, and always the war in Iraq.

And Clinton did not disparage his wife’s rivals directly, by name or otherwise.

“I like all these people running for president,” he said. “Just in the last few weeks I’ve read Sen. Edwards’ energy plan, Sen. Obama’s energy plan.”

He did, however, give hints of the differences between the Clinton world view and Obama’s — the difference between an appreciation of political combat and the desire to rise above it.

“The extreme right-wing faction of the Republican Party . . . they’ve been working on her for 16 years. I think she’s done pretty well. Don’t you?” he asked, to a wave of applause.

“She’s in way better shape now than I was before I got the nomination,” he said, and appeared to blame some of the stumbles of his 1992 primary campaign on the same “right-wing faction.”

“They worked on me because they didn’t want me to run and they were thinking that, ‘If I just keep dumping on Bill Clinton, I can convince Democrats to vote against him.’”

Clinton appeared at just one point to refer to Obama, as he was touting Sen. Clinton’s plan to create a new wave of environmentally oriented jobs and new national purpose behind ending global warming. That, the former president said, “helps to reduce partisanship.”

He acknowledged that Americans are tired of “extreme partisanship,” and suggested that when they ask what to do about it, “You might hear some version of ‘make nice.’

“I tried that,” Clinton said. “It didn’t work very well.”